Several times a year I require my students to memorize a poem. Sometimes I choose for them (say, “Death Be Not Proud,” by John Donne). Sometimes I hand them an anthology and let them choose. I don’t explain rhyme scheme or poetic devices. I only ask that the students know the meaning of every word in the poem, looking them up in the dictionary if they don’t.

At the beginning of the second semester, they receive their biggest poetry assignment of the year. I give them a list of long poems, none less than 40 lines, giving them eight weeks or so to choose one and memorize it. Their options range from Thomas Gray (1716-1771) to Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), with plenty of 19th-century choices (Keats, Coleridge, Poe). Inside those parameters, they’re free to follow their whims.

What I don’t tell the students is that many of these poems are considered un-cool, outdated, or just plain hard by literary critics, English professors, and the public at large. All the students know is that these poems happen to be in a book on the shelf in my classroom.

There’s freedom in their ignorance. No student has ever picked a poem because it’s “famous” or “important.” The many students who memorize Felicia Hemens’ “Casabianca” don’t know it’s been out of fashion for 75 years. They just like the way it sounds. As epic war poems go, George Croly’s “The Death of Leonidas” is a bit of a clunker, but it still stirs adolescent blood. Sometimes the students pick ones that “look easy,” but for the most part, when I ask them why they were drawn to one poem over all the others, they respond, “I just liked it.”

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it’s understood,” T. S. Eliot said. It’s true. Difficult language is easier to accept in poetry than in prose. Many of my students choose poems without knowing what they mean and consequently spend a lot of time with a dictionary. One pored over the second stanza of “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now,” by A. E. Housman, until he figured out the convoluted math and his eyes lit up with new appreciation. One time, I read Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to the class, and they applauded. It wasn’t my reading they were applauding, nor the sentiments expressed in the poem. It was the sheer sound of the words that moved them to applaud.

You may think of poetry with slight distaste, perhaps even a little embarrassment, as something you know you’re supposed to appreciate but can’t. Dana Gioia, former Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of “Poetry as Enchantment,” has said that the unpopularity of poetry is probably due to its being “too well taught.” Who could blame you for disliking something that takes a week of lectures on rhyme, meter, lyric forms, poetic devices, literary trends, and English grammar to appreciate? It’s like taking a Science of Cooking class before eating a hamburger. Instead, Gioia urges a return to the enchanting power of poetry. Read poems out loud, he says. Better yet, recite them from memory. Serve them to an engaged audience. That’s what poems are for.

Poetry has always been an elevated form of language, but until recently, it had a practical side as well. The simple fact is that it’s easier to memorize poetry than prose. The meter, the rhyme, and the vivid language all make the words come more quickly to mind. Historically, this quirk meant that poetry could be used to record things that would otherwise be lost to time – stories, legends, history, wisdom, worship. Nowadays, poems are more often used to record impressions of life, moments of beauty, insights into the self, small things worth noting. Robert Frost once said that poetry is “a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.” My students don’t know this, but in memorizing poetry, they are sandbagging themselves against the natural force of time, which could cause them to forget the things that are really important.

Let’s say I’ve convinced you. You resolve to memorize a poem. Where should you start?

Start with the least pretentious poetry collection you can find, something like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” No poem is too small or too humble. Based on Gioia’s recommendation, I picked up a copy of Garrison Keillor’s anthology “Good Poems,” which has, so far, lived up to its unpretentious name.

At the end of the day, the right poem to memorize is the one that, when someone asks why you were drawn to it, prompts you to honestly respond, “I just liked it.”

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Pxhere